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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

3D Printing and the Upcoming Cultural Crisis in Gun Control

3D printers represent a technology that may have great implications for the culture of prohibition–that idea that “things” can be controlled by regulation. Certainly this has become true for questions of copyright when it comes to the ease-of-copying and the digital era; but now 3D printers are bringing the ability to produce tangible objects into the hands of consumers–and, with the introduction of the physible, the ability to download plans for those objects from the Internet.

In the United States, gun control is a very big issue due to the lethal potential of the weapon and extremely active media coverage of events that involve guns. During 2012 alone, several mass shootings brought guns and gun control to the forefront of public attention. This means that anything even remotely related to the subject will also pull the spotlight. Guns are controlled through licensing and registering manufacturers as well as regulating how they’re made.

3D printers will more than likely entirely change the playing field.

A recent episode of CSI:NY posited a 3D printed revolver that could fire one or two shots before being destroyed (not entirely within the current technology, but that’s fiction for you). What we have entering the media nowadays is about being able to make parts for guns that take much less abuse such as the lower-receiver for an AR-15 (enabling the weapon to become automatic) and high capacity ammo magazines.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook school massacre has led to the discussion and passage of legislation designed to regulate gun parts. New York specifically banned magazines holding more than than seven rounds and a federal bill proposed by proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) that would ban magazines over ten rounds.

The “Cuomo Clip,” named for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who pushed the high-capacity clip ban through the Legislature, is made from a plastic filament similar to the type of material used to manufacture LEGO building blocks. It is also loaded with a large spring that helps to push rounds of ammo into the gun chamber.

The ammo magazine clip appears to be durable; Defense Distributed test-fired 86 rounds from a 30-round prototype last month, and the clip showed no signs of damage.

The controversy surrounding the capability of printing gun parts that would circumvent these type of bans has already been felt in the 3D printing community.

It’s worth noting that the student mentioned above happened to be Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed.

A company that also intends to set up a database to house purged or otherwise “fugitive” physibles that involve printable-gun related components. They already have a wiki project that contains CAD files for numerous different gun parts from AR-15 components to pistol stocks. Amid them, the schematics and instructions for printing a high capacity magazine that would make any ban of said component highly ineffective.

According to Wilson the site has seen “hundreds of thousands” of visitors since the schematics for the high capacity magazine was posted in mid-January.

Chances are good many of these downloaders do not have 3D printers of their own, but it does suggest that there’s a notable popularity for people to look into this technology in order to make their own magazine in the face of such a prohibition as New York has. No doubt, further news of legislation and the development of the federal bill will continue to bring this story back into the limelight.

About Kyt Dotson

Kyt Dotson is a Senior Editor at SiliconAngle and works to cover beats surrounding DevOps, security, gaming, and cutting edge technology. Before joining SiliconAngle, Kyt worked as a software engineer starting at Motorola in Q&A to eventually settle at Pets911.com where he helped build a vast database for pet adoption and a lost and found system. Kyt is a published author who writes science fiction and fantasy works that incorporate ideas from modern-day technological innovation and explore the outcome of living with those technologies.